Neat

by Steiner, Kandi

  “I’ve been thinking,” she said, voice a little lower now. “About what you said earlier. About me.”

  She was so close, just another inch and her chest would touch mine. Of course — the top of hers would hit the bottom of mine. She was at least a foot-and-a-half shorter than me.

  I swallowed, looking down the bridge of my nose at her glowing eyes. “Yeah?”

  “Yes,” she answered. “I like that you think I’m different.” Her eyebrows folded in. “Well, that you thought I was different. And I was hoping we could start over, that we could go back to when you thought I was this intriguing minx and not just the princess of Stratford — like everyone else in this town.”

  I smirked. “I never said I thought you were a minx.”

  “But you did,” she fired back with a smirk of her own. Her eyes glowed a little fiercer then. “You still do.”

  I rolled my lips between my teeth, looking up at the ceiling like God himself was up there to help me resist this woman in some way. When I looked at her again, her smile had climbed, eyes dancing in the low light of the bar as she waited for my answer.

  “We can start over,” I told her, avoiding the minx assessment altogether.

  She opened her mouth to respond just as the lead singer of the band came over the microphone to introduce himself and the rest of the crew. Mallory immediately cringed, plugging her ears with her fingers as she glanced up at the speaker that hung right above us.

  We were both silent as the band talked on, and when they started playing, Mallory unplugged her ears, saying something I couldn’t make out — no matter how hard I stared at her lips.

  And trust me — I was staring.

  “What?” I yelled over the music.

  She said it again, but I shook my head, still not able to make it out.

  Then, she grabbed the collar of my button-up plaid shirt and pulled my ear down to her lips. The soft, warm, velvet flesh of them brushed my ear lobe when she spoke.

  “Wanna get out of here? Take a walk?”

  Chills broke out over every inch of me — which thankfully was covered by the sleeves of my flannel shirt and the denim of my dark jeans. Mallory released my shirt, stepping back with a hopeful smile.

  Do not say yes.

  Do not go on a walk with that girl.

  Do not entertain whatever fantasy you have — not now, not ever.

  But I ignored every warning firing off in my head, nodding instead as I hung my cue stick on the rack and drained what was left of my whiskey. Mallory sucked her drink down, too, nodding toward the bathroom. “Just give me a minute,” she screamed. “I’ll meet you outside.”

  I nodded again, apparently speechless now that I’d agreed to leave Buck’s bar with Mallory Scooter. When she was inside the bathroom, I made my way over to the bar stool I’d abandoned next to my brothers, tugging my jacket off the back of it.

  “Where are you going?” Jordan asked.

  “On a walk.”

  “Alone?” Noah probed.

  “Why don’t you mind your own business?”

  Noah laughed, while Jordan’s brows folded over his eyes so hard I didn’t think he could see me when his hand caught the sleeve of my jacket in a fist.

  “She’s a Scooter,” he reminded me. “Watch yourself.”

  “She just wants to apologize,” I said, ripping my arm away from his grasp. “Besides, we work together. We need to get along.”

  Both of my older brothers watched me like I was a kid walking into a snake pit I didn’t even realize was there. What they didn’t know was that I saw the pit, I just didn’t care.

  Maybe the snakes weren’t the venomous type.

  Maybe they were garter snakes, like the ones Dad used to find in our yard all the time.

  Neither of them offered another word, and neither did I. I slapped some cash down on the bar for Buck for the tab I’d run up before Mallory paid for my last drink, nodding a goodbye to him before I made my way toward the door. Mallory was just outside, and when I pushed through the door, she turned, smiling as a puff of white left her mouth with her first breath.

  She was wrapped up in a black leather jacket and thick, burnt orange scarf. Her hands were in her pockets, eyes somehow different than they’d ever been before as she offered me a smile.

  “Should I lead the way, or am I following you?”

  Mallory

  Stratford was quiet, as it always was this late on a Monday night. Logan and I walked side by side, our steps in line, the only sound between us being the soft thumps of his boots on the sidewalk and the click-clacking from the heels of mine. Christmas lights were strung all along Main Street — curling up the light posts, adorning the limbs of each little naked tree, highlighting the storefront windows. Gold and garnet garland accompanied the lights on the posts, along with little signs that said things like Merry Christmas and ’Tis the Season.

  Even from where we walked at the north end of Main, you could see the lights from the big tree set up in our small town square at the south end of the main drag. That tree was erected every year on the Friday after Thanksgiving, Stratford residents always being more excited about seeing the ornaments and lights hung on that evergreen than they ever were about catching a Black Friday deal.

  The holidays in this small town weren’t just celebrated — they were honored like a sacred tradition.

  I smiled, eyes trailing over the enthusiastic display the little boutique in town had put together in their storefront. It was like looking into a snow globe at the North Pole — complete with elves, Santa and Mrs. Claus, and all the reindeer.

  “Do you like Christmas, Logan Becker?” I asked, pulling my gaze from the window back to the quiet man walking next to me. The same Scooter Whiskey Carhartt jacket he wore every day at work was warming him now, the hem of his blue and green flannel peeking out at the bottom. He wore an old baseball cap that I swore I’d seen him wear in high school, and his chestnut hair curled around the edges of it, giving him a young, boyish look.

  A soft smile touched his lips, but he kept his gaze on the sidewalk. “Are you insinuating that I’m the Grinch?”

  “No.” I chuckled. “Although, now that you say it, I could see you painted green and slipping down chimneys to steal presents.”

  Logan glanced at me with a smirk before he let his gaze wander up and over my head, trailing the lights around us. “I used to love it,” he said. “When I was younger. I always had this… I don’t know, this indescribable feeling of excitement that would come over me around Thanksgiving. I remember putting up the tree with Dad, making cookies with Mom, wearing matching pajamas with all three of my brothers and watching all the classic Christmas cartoons on Christmas Eve.” His eyes glistened under the lights, twinkling like stars. “I guess it’s that Christmas Spirit everyone talks about. But… I haven’t felt that in a long time.” He frowned. “Honestly, Christmas just kind of floats by for me now. I see the decorations everywhere, I hear the songs, I see the movies on TV, but… it’s just not the same. I don’t feel it anymore.”

  “Since your Dad passed?”

  His frown deepened on a nod.

  We fell silent again, and I did the math in my head, trying to remember the details of an event the entire town was always trying to forget — my family, especially. There had only been one death at the Scooter Whiskey distillery — and it was John Becker. I was eighteen, and we had just graduated high school. Mr. Becker was at the ceremony, and died weeks later.

  Logan was seventeen, I realized. I remembered he was always one of the young ones, and one of the only ones who couldn’t join the senior ditch day when we went to Nashville to bar hop all the places that let you in at eighteen.

  My heart lurched in my chest. I wasn’t close with my parents — not my weak, spineless mother and certainly not my greedy, pretentious father — but even so, I couldn’t imagine losing either one of them.

  “What about you?” Logan asked when the silence had stretched into awkwardness.
“Are you a Christmas fanatic, Mallory Scooter?”

  I smiled a sour smile at the mention of my full name, a name I’d tried to escape my entire life, a name I realized I’d never be rid of.

  “I’m not a fanatic about anything,” I admitted. “Save for art. All those feelings you had around Christmas? I never experienced any of that. For me, Christmas meant Mom hosting lots of grown-up parties with the town’s richest assholes, and Dad handing us gift cards of outrageous amounts on Christmas morning. Mom would decorate the house, but more for the town than for us kids. And I don’t believe in the ‘reason for the season’, as they say.” I shrugged. “But, I do love how magical it all can be, and I love to illustrate it, photograph it. Honestly, I was just thinking how this is the first time I’ve walked this town’s streets and seen anything close to beauty. I kind of wish I had my camera with me.”

  “You’re talking about me, aren’t you?”

  I scoffed. “I mean the lights are pretty.” I paused. “I just never thought that before — not here, anyway.”

  We were quiet again, but I felt Logan watching me, his eyes dancing over my profile as I kept my gaze on the glowing Main Street tree in the distance.

  “You seemed close with your family,” he commented. “Until high school. It was like something switched over the summer between eighth and ninth grade, and you were a completely different person when you came back to school.”

  A chill rolled over me at the thought of that summer, but I smirked to hide it. “Everyone changes before high school,” I commented. “I mean, you came back with muscles the size of my head.”

  “First you call me beautiful, now you’re commenting on my muscles?” He tsked. “Feels like some real not-safe-for-work territory we’re crossing into here, Minx.”

  I rolled my eyes, thinking the subject would change, but Logan still watched me, waiting.

  “Let’s just say I had an eye-opening experience that summer, one that showed me my family’s true colors.”

  “And you didn’t like them?”

  I stopped walking, and Logan followed my lead, facing me in the middle of the sidewalk at the corner of Main and Ivy.

  “Your entire family hates mine,” I reminded him. “Is it really so hard to believe that I share the sentiment?”

  The comment came out more of a bite than I intended, and Logan softened, his eyes searching mine.

  “I’m sorry, I feel like I overstepped.”

  “It’s okay,” I assured him on a long exhale and a gentle shake of my head. “It’s been a long day, as you well know. I think it might be time for me to get some sleep.”

  He nodded. “Yeah, I think that’d probably be best for both of us.” I watched the thick Adam’s apple in his throat bob on a swallow, and I wondered how I never realized how hot his neck was before.

  Wait — did I just think his neck was sexy?

  “Let me walk you home?” he asked.

  I smiled. “Alright.” We took three more steps, and I stopped again. “Welp, this is me. Thank you.”

  Logan’s brows bent together, and he looked up at the last shop in the brick building behind me. I didn’t have signage up yet, and when his gaze fell to the windows — to the empty space inside those windows — his eyes doubled in size.

  “You live here?”

  I chuckled. “I live upstairs, above the shop.” Following his gaze, I smiled at the empty building behind me — a blank canvas — before I turned back to him with a beam of pride. “This is going to be my art studio — the first one in town.”

  “Wait, really?” He stepped past me, framing his eyes with his hands and pressing them to the windows to see more inside before he turned to face me again. “This is yours?”

  “Mm-hmm. Well, technically, it’s in my father’s name for now… but we have a deal and…” I shook my head. “Anyway, yes — it’s mine.” I swallowed, not sure why my stomach sank to my feet when the next words rolled off my lips. “Want to see it?”

  “Like, go inside?”

  I nodded.

  Logan smiled enough to show that little dimple in his left cheek, which somehow made my stomach flip even more. “I’d love that.”

  It was definitely the cold Tennessee night that had my hands trembling as I unlocked the doors. It was absolutely the fact that my leather jacket was more of a fashion statement than anything that could actually keep me warm. That’s what I assured myself as the bolt unlocked and I pushed inside, Logan following close behind me.

  It definitely wasn’t because I was nervous, or because I hadn’t shown my studio to anyone other than my parents and my best friend, and surely it wasn’t because showing someone my naked studio felt a lot like showing them my naked body.

  Which meant I was stripping down bare for Logan Becker.

  I kept my jacket on, hoping it would calm my tremors as I pulled off to the side once we were in the studio, Logan walking past me, his eyes wide as he looked around the space. I tucked myself into the corner, as if I could hide, as if I could disappear and not watch him dissect the space.

  Does he hate it?

  Is it stupid?

  Is he thinking no one will ever pay to take classes here?

  Is he thinking art is a waste of time, just like my father?

  I shouldn’t have cared. I didn’t want to care, but thoughts like those raced through my mind as I watched Logan from the corner of the room. He traveled the space quietly, slowly, eyes roaming, hands reaching out to trace the walls, the windows, the exposed brick on the back wall. Not much had changed since Chris was there on Saturday. We’d painted the walls, cleaned the brick, swept and mopped the tile floor, and cleaned out what was left in the back storage. Where it was a dusty blank slate before, at least now it was a clean one.

  But it was still blank, and I wasn’t sure anyone could see the vision except for me.

  “Mallory…” Logan whispered, like speaking too loud in the space would disrupt it somehow. He stopped in the middle of the room, eyes scanning the ceiling before his gaze found me. “This is incredible.”

  I blew out a breath. “Really?”

  “Are you kidding?” He smirked. “You have your own art studio, your own business. I’m so impressed.” Logan shook his head, looking around again. “I can’t wait to see what you do with it.”

  “Right?” I said, excitement bubbling over the anxiety as I pushed out of my corner and flew across the room. “I want it to be a multi-channel visual arts studio, with more than just one thing to offer. Like, over here, we’ll have painting classes, with live models and still life and scenery inspiration, with all mediums — watercolor, oil, pastel, maybe even spray painting to jazz it up from time to time. And over here, sketch classes.” I pointed to the far corner. “I want to transform that little office back there into a dark room to develop photographs, and do some walking tours around town where I can teach the photography essentials, help those who are interested in the art. Oh!” I skipped to the other side of the room. “And, over here, I thought I could put in an electric kiln, offer some pottery and ceramic classes. I think it’d be great for kids, and I could have more advanced classes for the adults — like vases and other things they’d love to decorate their homes with. And of course, I could host parties, do a sort of paint-by-numbers fun class like they do at those little drink and paint places in Nashville.”

  I whipped back around, smile nearly splitting my face — because though we were standing in an empty studio, it wasn’t empty to me anymore. I could see it — all of it — every little picture I’d just painted verbally coming alive as if I’d dreamed it into reality in that dark space.

  When my eyes found Logan again, he was watching me in a way I’d never been watched before. One brow was slightly quirked, his eyes wide and curious, the corner or his mouth lifted. It was like I was a street performer he’d just stumbled upon, like he was trying to figure out what I was doing, where the act was going, how much he should leave in my tip jar.

  “W
hat?” I asked, breathless.

  His smile climbed. “I just love seeing people talk about what they’re most passionate about,” he said simply. “And I’m excited. For you, for this place. It’s going to be great, Mallory.”

  I blushed, and as soon as I realized that was what was happening, that the heat in my cheeks was a visible sign of being a mixture of embarrassed and flattered, I wanted to slap myself — I probably would have, if that wouldn’t have made me look like even more of a weirdo.

  Suddenly, a dark figure scurried out from the back office, little legs carrying it straight toward me. But before I could bend to scratch behind Dalí’s ear, Logan wrapped his arms around my waist, swinging me behind him and standing like a brick wall between me and the ball of fluff like it was a bear instead of a cat. One hand held me in place behind him as the other splayed in front of him, like a shield or a weapon.

  If it wasn’t somehow so fucking endearing that he was trying to protect me from something, I would have laughed.

  “Wait!” I said, grabbing his shoulders to hold him back from killing my furry friend. “It’s just Dalí.”

  Logan relaxed — though only marginally, and he still stood in front of me. “Who?”

  I chuckled, releasing my grip on his shoulders as I made my way around him and bent to pick up the cat. “Dalí,” I repeated. “He was a stray, and I adopted him. Thought he’d make a pretty cute shop cat.”

  Dalí croaked out an old meow when he was in my arms, his signature motorboat purr sparking to life. He was warm, like he’d been wrapped in a ball sleeping somewhere in the back, but I couldn’t shake the fact that I missed another warmth I’d had just moments before.

  Logan’s body against mine, his hand on my waist…

  “He is pretty cute,” Logan said, relaxing even more now. He took a step toward us, reaching one finger under Dalí’s chin to rub the patch of white there. Dalí leaned into the touch, which earned a chuckle from Logan and a smile from me.

  When Dalí had enough petting for his liking, he wormed around in my arms until I lowered him back to the ground. He meowed once more before skipping off somewhere in the back, and then it was just Logan and me again.